Opal Health

Opal Health is a non-profit dedicated to saving the lives of mothers and newborn babies in Uganda. It does this through bringing communities together, teaching them about health issues and supporting them to solve their biggest challenges. 

Every 7 seconds, a woman or newborn dies due to complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. This crisis is most severe in sub-Saharan Africa, where over 200,000 mothers and 1 million newborns die annually from preventable causes. Over 70% of these deaths are preventable with simple solutions; they occur not because care is unavailable, but because it arrives too late. 

In rural communities in eastern Uganda, women face barriers such as misinformation about their health, lack of transport to health facilities, and unsupportive cultural attitudes, which turn manageable complications like hemorrhage, infection, or obstructed labor into fatal events. These are hard problems to solve from the top-down and these are the hardest communities to reach. Hospitals and health professionals tell us that when women reach care, it is often too late.

This is why we started Opal Health. We believe that too many mothers and newborns are still dying from causes that can be prevented with the right support at the right time. We are working with the hardest to reach and poorest villages where there is limited support. 

Our goal in 2026 is simple: to reach over 500 pregnant women in eastern Uganda and ensure they have a safe and healthy birth. 

We achieve this through Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), a proven, community-driven method that is recommended by the World Health Organisation and shown to reduce maternal mortality by 49% and neonatal mortality by 33%. We will partner with the Ugandan Ministry of Health to equip frontline Community Health Workers to deliver this programme to 500 women in 20 villages. These solutions are often straightforward, but they save lives: for example, improving hygiene practices to reduce newborn infections, establishing small savings schemes for emergency transport, or using simple data to help identify high-risk pregnancies sooner. 

Your donation enables the training, materials, and follow-up needed to launch and sustain these community groups. It costs just $8 to organise and run a community group. With $105 we can reach a new community, helping another 500 people. We need to raise $30,000 in 2026 to make sure we can continue to help women and babies in need.